Despite the exploratory implication of terms such as “browsing” and “surfing,” web usage or other types of data acquisition often follow routine patterns of access. For example, a typical user may read a web-based newspaper the first thing in the morning, then spend a few hours on software development, with intermittent consultation of online programming documentation. Following a break at noon for lunch and to read comics or conduct other leisure activity on the web, the user may return to programming, take a mid-afternoon break to check news and possibly read a few more comics, and finally consult online transit information shortly before leaving in the evening. Such stereotypical patterns of web access are common. However, despite the regularity with which users view web or other type information content, few intuitive and/or automated mechanisms exist to assist with these routine tasks. As an example, lists of bookmarks generally must be authored and maintained manually by users and are often presented in a cumbersome hierarchical menu. Links and content on personalized portals (e.g., MSN) can be constructed and are more easily navigable, but still are generally selected and managed by users in an explicit manner.
One such system for managing and navigating web-based information includes an architecture that relies on site descriptions, which are essentially programs that run on a web site (e.g., following links, filling in forms, and so forth) and produce a block of HTML as output, for example. A system employing this concept can enable users to select site descriptions desired on a start page, execute the site descriptions and concatenate the results for display. This approach has several drawbacks however. First, site description architectures generally require manual selection of web content to display, thus causing users to expend time to manually maintain a page. Second, these type architectures often do not provide great insight or views into the actual content that may appear or be available at a remote location (without actual navigation to the site), because the architectures generally only involve filtering web content based on an HTML markup of a remote site or page.
Another similar system provides automatically building bookmark lists. These systems can channel user's browsing through a proxy to log web access patterns. From the logged access patterns, a web directory of the pages each user visits can be built by selecting which pages to include by how often the user visits the pages and by an associated link structure. Still yet another system provides a user-controlled automated system that maintains a hierarchical organization of a user's bookmarks while letting the user control certain aspects (e.g., “freezing” nodes in a node hierarchy to prevent them from being changed). Automatic bookmark systems can reduce the effort required by the user to maintain their bookmark lists, but do not address all the drawbacks of such lists. For example, bookmark lists are generally insensitive to a user's browsing context, and may require substantial user effort to find a target link (e.g., navigating a hierarchical menu structure and/or substantial drilling down through a web directory).